by Julie Leto
Sean stood over Jarek’s shoulder, scanning the black-and-white images for any sign of the two missing agents.
“Never met him.”
She nodded. “He was pushed out of the Arm long before you signed up. I just thought that maybe, since he knew Jayda.”
Sean swung around. “You knew Jayda?”
Macy, bent over the crib as she removed the baby’s outerwear, shrugged nonchalantly. “We met once. She worked in a different division.”
“That’s a nice way to put it,” Sean replied.
Macy lifted the baby, cradling her over one arm so that she was perched like a cat on a mantelpiece. Brynn couldn’t help but smile at how comfortable Macy was with the child even though, from everything she knew about her, the former T-45 agent was a lot like her: driven, serious and ruthless, and when needed, cold as ice.
Though since she’d met Sean, Brynn had felt anything but glacial.
“Jayda was a troubled person,” Macy said.
Sean snorted. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I think it’s important for you to remember.”
“Who said I forgot?”
Sean’s volume raised enough so that Jarek swiveled his chair. With a glance, Macy reassured him. He returned to tuning the radio equipment to intercept signals from their missing team.
“No one,” Macy said calmly, “but I’m not privy to what’s been going on in your head since those men took you. I would have gotten to you sooner, but I didn’t have the manpower. T-45 is in the midst of another shift in leadership, and since I’m inactive, I’m pretty much persona non grata when it comes to calling in favors.”
Brynn stepped forward. “Wait. You hired me? Why? And why pretend to be your husband?”
“Dante is on a very important assignment in the Middle East, unrelated to this assignment. I needed you to act fast and with the utmost secrecy, so I invoked his personal connection with you without his knowledge.”
Sean cursed, but Brynn decided they had a whole host of issues that were more important than Macy’s motivations for saving Sean’s life.
“So your husband knows nothing about this?” Brynn asked.
“Before we got married, Dante left the CIA. Abercrombie Marshall, my mentor and friend, finally got his shot at Agency leadership, and Dante was able to spend more time with me, doing the occasional job for T-45 until we got married and had Abby. When Abe got sick, he tapped Dante to return as his replacement. A lot of people are still suspicious of his loyalties. I couldn’t drag him into this, even if I could reach him, which I can’t. Not for another couple of days.”
“That doesn’t explain how I got dragged into this,” Sean protested.
Macy fished a fresh pacifier out of the baby’s bag, coaxed it into Abby’s mouth and then laid her into the crib. She turned the dial on a musical mobile that hung from the edge and then gestured Brynn and Sean to a small dinette set in the corner of the room.
She was about to continue her explanation when Jarek announced that he’d located the missing agents.
“I think they’re alive.”
“Go get them,” Macy said. “We’re safe here. Call me after you’ve assessed their injuries. I need to know that no one else is on the property.”
Jarek took off. Sean hardly waited for the door to close before he said, “Back up to the beginning. Tell me how you even knew I was kidnapped.”
Macy folded her hands in front of her with a casual grace that told Brynn she’d endured more than a few hostile interrogations.
“My discovery was accidental. When Abe died, he left me his personal papers. We were very close,” Macy said to Brynn. “A letter indicated that I should contact you about his passing, which put you on my radar. He also asked me to go through his pictures before I did. It took me a while to understand what I was supposed to tell you about some random photographs of people I didn’t know. Then I realized they were coded messages.”
From the diaper bag, she retrieved a sealed file folder and handed it to Sean. He hesitated, torn between scowling and opening the packet.
Brynn placed her hand on his wrist and then looked up at Macy. “Why did Dante tell you about me?”
Macy’s half grin was slightly intimidating. “Personally, I think he was showing off. He did save your life, after all.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Life debts don’t come with an expiration date.”
Brynn refused to be cowed by the wicked gleam in Macy’s eyes. “No, they don’t. I hope he wasn’t…indiscreet.”
Macy laughed. “The perfect gentleman, but he made it a point to tell me that he’d been watching you. That he considered you someone he could trust if he ever needed someone with no direct agency connections.”
“Maybe he was just trying to make you jealous,” Brynn suggested.
Again, Macy found her comment amusing. “Probably. But if there’s one thing I know about my husband, it’s that he doesn’t tell me anything he doesn’t think I need to know. So after I figured out what Abe was trying to tell me with these photos, I sent a courier to Louisiana. He saw you get drugged and shanghaied by a cadre of Russian gangsters,” she said to Sean. “He was able to identify them as mercenaries with ties to the North Korean secret police. That’s when I figured the time had come for Brynn to repay Dante by freeing Sean before they killed him.”
“Russians?” Sean asked. “North Koreans?”
Macy sighed. “When you get into trouble, Devlin, you get into trouble.”
“How did you fake Dante’s voice?” Brynn asked, not interested in allowing the fire crackling between Sean and Macy to explode into a blaze.
“A gift from my husband. He had the program created before he left on this assignment, just in case I needed him to order someone to do something I didn’t have the authority for.”
“Nice,” Brynn said.
Macy waved the compliment aside. “One of the perks of being married to a powerful man, but one that could be dangerous in the wrong hands. But honestly, even if Dante had been reachable, I might not have told him about Sean. The CIA was strong-armed, pardon the pun, into hiring him to replace Abe. Throwbacks to old, failed operations like the Jayda Hai debacle wouldn’t do him any favors.”
Sean spread the trio of photos on the table. Brynn looked at them, immediately thinking of the staged poses that were often inserted into picture frames before they were sold. Big, smiling faces stared up at them, with nothing distinctive or personal in the poses or expressions.
“Abe’s family?” Brynn asked.
Macy shook her head. “Abe had no family. Also, Abe was a black man. All these people are white…except this couple,” she said, tapping her finger on an Asian couple standing underneath what looked like a sign for a bar. “She looks a little like Jayda, don’t you think?”
Despite her best effort not to, Brynn pressed her finger to a corner of the photo and dragged it closer. The woman in the picture was young and vivacious, with laughter in her mouth and eyes that bordered on hysteria. She and her photo-mate, a slim Anglo boy in tight jeans who looked nothing like Sean, were clearly having a good time out on the town.
“She looks nothing like Jayda,” Sean said coolly.
Macy was not deterred. “Doesn’t she? It’s hard to see in black and white, but I’m pretty sure that’s a streak of color in her hair. Didn’t Jayda prefer blue?”
Sean took the photo from Brynn and looked again, his chin set with barely contained rage. Every time Jayda’s name came up, Sean filled with anger as quickly as helium flooded a child’s balloon. A picture, even one of a woman who only slightly resembled her, pushed him close to popping.
“You got Jayda from a nearly imperceptible streak of hair color?” Brynn challenged.
“Not at first. But why else would Abe leave me photographs of strangers? On the first morning after Abby had slept through the night, it finally came to me. It was a code.”
“About Jayda?” Sean asked.
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“About you. That bar is in New Orleans,” she said, tapping her fingernail on the wrought-iron balcony slightly blurred in the background. “I used photo recognition software to pinpoint the location. The place was called The Devil Lounge.”
“Never heard of it,” he said, though Brynn knew as well as he did that the number of bars in New Orleans was not disproportionate to the number of tourists who drank at them.
“It closed the year Jayda died.”
“So what?” Sean snapped.
“So years and numbers and names are the building blocks of my business. You’re from New Orleans, your last name is Devlin, a variation of devil, and Jayda’s death caused you to leave the Agency.”
“I left before she died,” he corrected.
She shrugged. “It’s still a valid connection, especially when you take into consideration all the other information I gleaned from the companion pieces.”
Sean looked at the photos again, but Brynn knew he wasn’t seeing them. He was looking for information that only Macy could translate. And if he wanted her cooperation, he was going to have to calm down.
Little by little, his expression transformed until rage became surprise. “Why would he send messages about Jayda if he believed she was dead?”
“She is dead,” Macy confirmed, “now. But she wasn’t when you were first told she was gone. She faked her death the first time, and I believe these photographs tell us why.”
Twelve
Sean’s chest seized. He felt as if someone had injected a white-hot metal tube into his navel and pumped him with liquid lead.
When Dante had come to him, Jayda hadn’t really been dead.
She’d been alive. And in his hometown?
Impossible.
“She was in Louisiana?” he asked.
Macy motioned to Brynn to trade seats, which she did without a word. Sean nearly snagged her wrist to keep her close, but the instinct dispersed the minute Macy slid beside him and began to speak.
“Actually, no. I don’t think so,” she said. “It took me a while to piece together a timeline. From what I can tell from the embedded codes in these photos and from the notes I found in Abe’s private papers, he helped Jayda fake her death and create a new identity in San Francisco.”
Sean wasn’t sure what had gotten caught in his throat, but whatever it was, it was dry and wooly and large. He attempted to force out one of the million questions jockeying for position in his head, but Macy saved him the agony by continuing.
“See? This picture?” she said, dragging a second photo forward. “It’s taken on Pier 39. I believe the New Orleans reference in the first photo spoke not to her location but yours.”
Sean slid the picture closer again. He saw no resemblance to Jayda in the smiling Asian model and saw nothing of himself in the Caucasian man beside her.
“You’re sure?”
Macy pursed her lips. “This kind of code reading is not precise, but Abe knew it was my expertise. Some breakers excel at mathematical puzzles, which, of course, I can do, but others, like me, do even better with visual ciphers and metaphoric messages. It makes sense that he’d try to communicate with me this way. But to be honest, a lot of it was guesswork until I found this.”
She handed him the third photograph. This one had a distinctly blonde bride looking longingly into the eyes of her tall, dark, handsome and nondescript groom. Sean saw nothing unusual or telling in the picture until Macy tapped her fingernail on the charms dangling from the bride’s wrist.
Then he looked closer. One charm was the Korean symbol for Jayda’s name. The second was the symbol for death. The third, partially eradicated with a crude pencil eraser, was the symbol for lie.
Jayda’s death had been a lie.
Sean pushed away from the table. He was suddenly aware of the baby chatting nonsensically in the crib. Drawn to the sound, Sean watched her wiggle her fingers about an inch from her eyes then turn her hand palm in and palm out.
The pacifier muted her giggles, but her joy in discovery was unmistakable.
Lucky kid. Sometimes, discovery sucked.
“So you figured out that Jayda had faked her death. Why contact me? She obviously didn’t want me to know.”
She moved the New Orleans shot to the forefront again. “Abe wanted you to know.”
“Why send a courier? Why not just call?”
“Jayda was a high-value asset. I couldn’t risk sharing any information about her over the phone. I figured I’d send you copies of the photographs and you’d come to me to help you sort them out. You know what I do.”
“You couldn’t have just invited me to visit?”
Macy laughed. “With a newborn in the house and Dante out of the country? That would have looked suspicious, especially to you.”
“Why didn’t you use your software?” Brynn asked. “It worked on me.”
“You hadn’t heard Dante’s voice for years. I didn’t think it would fool Sean, and if he started asking around, questioning why Dante was trying to lure him to France, people who didn’t need to be suspicious might have become so. Look, how and why I made my decisions are moot points. The information is what’s important.”
Sean jabbed his hands through his hair. As much as he hated her reasoning, Sean knew Macy was right. What was done was done.
“Your guy witnessed my kidnapping?”
“He waited at your residence for a couple of days, but when you didn’t show up, I ordered him to track you down. He saw the attack, but he was outmanned and outgunned. He collected enough information so that I could find you, and I called Brynn. You did a terrific job, by the way. I’ll have to remember Titan in the future.”
Brynn showed no sign of being flattered. “Why didn’t you answer my requests for more information once I had Sean back at the safe house?”
Macy frowned. “I didn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle yet. I didn’t want to exchange too much information with you and tip my hand that I wasn’t really Dante. It was a tactical decision and one I regret. I had men watching you. Backup. But you gave them the slip, not to mention a slew of serious injuries.”
Brynn offered no apology, and Sean was glad. Macy had run her operation like most T-45 agents would—with maximum secrecy and minimum common sense.
In other words, by the seat of her damned pants.
“So while I was healing, you were trying to work out the rest of the code and figure out who took me.”
“I knew who took you the minute I figured out that Jayda was at the heart of the operation,” Macy replied. “The only people interested in her are the North Koreans.”
“They let her go a long time ago,” he argued.
“Not by choice,” Macy replied. “According to what I’ve learned from Abe’s notes, Jayda had acquired a valuable piece of information during one of her missions. She used it as a fail-safe that forced the North Koreans to let her defect. They had a simple deal: they let her live and she made sure her intel never got out, not to T-45 or, when she left the consortium, to her new bosses at the CIA.”
Sean’s ears rang as if someone had just knocked him in the head with a billy club. Jayda had never said anything to him about a fail-safe. And as far as he knew, he was the only person she would have trusted with information that could keep her alive.
But then, everything he knew about her had been a lie, hadn’t it? Or at the very least, half-truths.
“Who did she tell the secret to?” he asked. “Someone must have known in case the North Koreans eliminated her.”
“Abe,” Macy answered flatly.
“The head of an Agency kept that information to himself?”
Macy shrugged. “Abe wasn’t a typical bureaucrat. But in his position, no one could touch him. The information was safe. Once he died, though, all bets were off.”
“But now Jayda’s really dead,” Brynn insisted.
Macy slipped back into the file again, this time extracting a newspaper clipping from the San Francis
co Chronicle. Sean scanned the article, stopping when he caught sight of the DMV photo of a woman who’d died in a freak accident.
A truck had plowed into a playground.
The name below the photo did not say Jayda Hai, but it didn’t have to. He’d know those eyes anywhere.
“So the secret died with her and Abe,” Sean concluded. “Why kidnap me?”
“Clearly, the North Koreans have reason to believe that the information has been passed to a third party.”
“What if Jayda faked her death again?” Brynn suggested, grabbing the newspaper. “This story could have been planted.”
“My contacts in California verified that she died at the scene. I’ve seen the autopsy photos. I didn’t know Jayda personally, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s her.”
“There are doubts in mine,” Sean insisted.
He didn’t want to see autopsy photos, but before he moved one step further in figuring out how he’d gotten from a street corner in the United States to a cave in the south of France, he had to be sure that the woman he’d loved, lost, then lost again was truly gone for good.
Macy took out the photos. She laid them face down on the table then scooped the baby out of the crib and crooned to her as she strolled to the other side of the room. On the video feed, Sean saw that Jarek had arrived at the scene of the ambush and was lifting one of the injured men into the Landrover.
Brynn slid in behind him and braced her hands on his shoulders. His instinct was to shrug her off, but he fought it, instead allowing the warmth of her hands to suffuse into his neck and shoulders. He’d never ask her to stand at his side like this, but he was grateful she was there.
He flipped the first photo. Brynn gasped. He held his emotions in check, nodding as he scoured the gruesome shot. It was Jayda, and she was dead. Yes, the photographs could have been doctored. Sure, the autopsy could have been staged.
It really didn’t matter.
Jayda was gone—if not from this world, then definitely from his heart.